If you enjoy consuming something, but you later find out that you found or experienced it under a false pretense, does it matter how it came into your stream of consciousness? Many people who search probably do not realize search results have paid ads on them, or that some engines may bias their regular results toward informational websites to increase ad clickthrough rate.

Few people understand that the organic search results are manipulated by people like you or I. Google states that some kinds of manipulation are acceptable while others are not. But who gives Google that authority when they sometimes do not even follow their own guidelines or policies? How can they freely add links to other's websites, buy links, sell links, and state that buying or selling other types of links is somehow wrong?

Google teaches publishers to blend ads in their content, and funds the placement of ads on what many call low quality content. Yet some people land on those pages, click on the ad that describes what they want, and end up somewhere they want to be.

Many magazines blend ads to look like content, and/or have insertion fees which is basically a way to buy exposure.

People create and spin controversies to get media exposure. In some cases both parties involved in the controversy will have off the record chats to talk about how the story should be spun for maximum benefit to both sides.

I have seen people give away tens of thousands of dollars worth of their books because their book was nothing more than thinly disguised self-promotional marketing material. And I have seen some of these books become best sellers!

Some people watch Fox News even though it is blatantly and obviously biased. Many news channels show packaged video press releases as being part of their news program. And many news networks work with one another to present a highly biased view of the world that promotes the agendas of affiliated businesses.

Generally any form of content creation, publishing, aggregation, or information sorting is going to be biased toward the goal of self preservation and the beliefs of the power sources within that organization (and affiliated organizations). Goal #1 of any business or organization is self preservation.

Right now there is a diary video series on YouTube which is fake, and will likely a lead in to some sort of movie or marketing message (or maybe all content is somehow a form of marketing). Yet each of the 27 videos in the series (thusfar) has averaged around 200,000 views.

Many artists write abstract song lyrics which have entire sites devoted to what the hell did they mean?

People have got other ideas out of things I have wrote and called me a genius or brilliant for their (mis)interpretation of what I wrote. If I meant what they thought I did, then I would indeed be far smarter than I am. :)

Every human action, every thought pattern, and just about every piece of information is likely somehow flawed (during creation and during interpretation / consumption).

Does it matter if information was created via pure intentions that matched why the audience like it?

Does it matter if information is ranked, sorted, placed, or found via the force of a person who bought the exposure or gained it through gaming some authority system which claims to be relevant even though it doesn't understand why?

Outside of ignorance, is purity anything more than a myth?

A prospective client with a brand new high end LARGE website wanted me to provide a comprehensive actionable SEO and internet marketing plan for a couple grand, noting that at near $100,000 for a single page ad in a print magazine that the print magazines were out of the question. When I told him a price point of what he was asking for he balked, stating "Excuse me? You'd charge me up to $__k for a plan? You've got to be kidding!"

I don't hard sell services because I have been building way too many of my own sites, and they are typically far more profitable than most client work. Call me a sucker, but I am a big fan of passive income sites that pay far more than most clients are willing to pay. Especially since they have no deadlines, offer passive income, give me a bigger cut, can be focused on whatever I am interested in, and allow me to shift from topic to topic as my interests change.

It is kinda perplexing to have spent a bunch of time building up a strong brand only to have claimed marketing experts contact you and low ball you so much. It makes you wonder why SEO is such a saturated field, and why so many people sell services so hard when there is so much more money to be made selling products, building affiliate sites, or selling contextual ads.

Imagine that you can build 2 legitimate 12 page sites a week, with each of them bringing in $200 a month (and virtually 100% margin passive income after 2 months). If your income increased by at least $400 every week how long would you need to build sites to dump low end client work? And what if it grew quicker because you tracked market feedback?

If you think a single page glossy page ad is worth more than what I could do in a month of time you are probably mistaken. If you think it is worth 50X what I could do then "You've got to be kidding".

Most sales consist of a series of micro sales. Most people do not just go to a website and buy right away.

We learn to trust brands, companies, people, and websites. Network marketplaces offer user feedback which act as currency. If you are on eBay and are about to buy an expensive product you are probably going to look through some of the other feedback the merchant has.

The web as a whole also offers many layers of feedback. If people search for your brand what do they find? When people search for SEO Book most of the feedback (except for the occasional BrantRant) is positive in nature. When people ask about your brand in a forum do you get ripped to shreds or does your site usually stand up ok?

I recently had an SEO executive tell me I was an idiot for saying I ranked well for SEO Book, and then he used Overture to show that term draws no traffic.

In search terms keywords are all important and with the keyword book on SEO "seo book" receives 322 searches per month in 1st position you will receive an estimate, for argument sack 10% CTR, meaning 32 clicks to your website.

If one of those 32 convert you have value.

Unbeknown to that SEO professional, most people looking for SEO related stuff use Google, and his traffic estimates for my site for my well branded term are off by at least a factor of a 100.

But the point of my post is not to try to talk up this site. This site is complete rubbish to over 99% of the people on the web. To them it has less than no value. But (hopefully) not to you. And thanks for reading it!

The feedback I have gained from readers in that other 0.001% have helped me to

• offer a better product

• increase brand awareness
• sell more
• meet great people
• come across other amazing opportunities

Brand related search queries and consumer feedback come at the end of the trust cycle though. First you must gain attention, awareness, and credibility. Each time someone takes the time to read something you write or revisits your site you have made another mini sale. A bit more mind-share. Maybe they link to your site. Maybe they come back for another read. Maybe they tell a friend about it. Maybe they mention your site on a forum or say good things if someone flames you, etc.

If I could give my book away free without being 99% certain that people would think it is worthless based on its price I probably would. It would give me a ton more mind-share (that could be leveraged into currency in other ways), but it would give me access to a brutal group of customers:

Actually it's kinda sad in a way. I've given away almost a hundred copies of the SEO Tutor© optimization book to newbies and intermediates alike and with a few exceptions, the message is always the same, "I don't want to do any real work; I just want to get rich fast."

That is not to say that I think I (or SEO Tutor) have low product quality, just that feedback is exceptionally valuable, and pricing at free might prevent you from getting the feedback you need while adding a ton of noise to the feedback you do get.

Most value based systems are arbitrary in nature. Money is a means to barter, but not a finite resource. Stocks are just pieces of paper, as are baseball cards, and books, etc. Diamonds are just stupid rocks. But most established value systems (moral, financial, etc.) have value because people have pushed them long and hard.

Why was slavery legitimate in the US long after most of the advanced world considered it repulsive if we are the land of the free? Someone pushed and sold that story. Why must we have a war on drugs? Why must you be afraid of terrorists? and sugar? Someone is selling those stories.

Value based systems (and thus the perception of value) typically take a long time to build. To get people to value what you are doing you have to over-invest for a while with the hopes that the value will come back, but retail only has value if you have exposure and people are buying.

Many of the people who read my ebook and say "I need help with SEO and your book did nothing for me" have a one page sales-letter site that says "buy now or forever screw off". They limit the types of sales they can make, and the speed with which they can gain mind-share or learn from feedback.

Each feedback route or potential audience presents another opportunity to gain mind-share. For example, if you are multilingual and typically write in one language also post your thoughts in another. If you have a news site then try to get in Google news. If you have an informal news site maybe call it a blog to make it easier for other bloggers to identify with your work and link at you.

If a site does not give people reasons to come back and does not give people many reasons / ways to show trust then the odds of the project becoming a long-term success are much lower. If no humans show that they trust your site then why should search engines?

Let's pretend you are walking the streets of Amsterdam at 1:12 AM and someone comes up to you and whispers

coke charlie, coke charlie, got what you need

then the next guy walking past you says

sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiifffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

There is no rapport building there. Buy now or forever screw off.

Compare that to a local mischief guide (perhaps a topical authority?), who might start a dialog with something like:

Are looking for a drink or a smoke? The coffeeshops just closed, but there are still a few bars are open a few blocks up. If you need papers they sell those right up the street. If you need a smoke I sell some ______ right here.

Which one of those people would you be more willing to trust?

I am not advocating drug use, but if you assumed that 99% of everything on the web is shady (coke charlie got what you need) then you would be viewing content the way a search engineer does.

9 times out of 10 (with the other 1 in 10 being their own content, or content from partner businesses) they want to rank the least shadiest offers, and hope the other ones wind up buying ads, which they can plaster all over the web, to help spread their value based system.

coke charlie, etc. ;)

My friend Joel recently mentioned a cool project called We Feel Fine, which tracks human emotions expressed in blog posts. After his most recent commercial shoot I think Joel feels sore (but his post is funny).

I am sure the methodology to We Feel Fine could be a bit more advanced, but what a cool idea, eh?

By Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans.

Link Building... Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it's still the trump card for higher rankings.

Many of us have been hoping that it would go away. In Brett Tabke's 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sentiment that many, many webmasters hold on to as a hope:

What happens to all those Wavers that think [i]Getting Links = SEO[/i] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on "links=seo". When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

The pertinent questions:

1. Will link building still be very important for rankings in the medium term?
2. When will link popularity be devalued in favor of other algo elements (that are less tedious, from a webmaster's point of view)?

The answers:

1. Sorry, but link building is still going to be the SEO trump card for the foreseeable future.
2. I wouldn't hold your breath for search engine algorithms to place less importance on link popularity until the Semantic Web arrives, or maybe when HTTP gets replaced by a new protocol. Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the forseeable future they're going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.

What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn't count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.

But please, don't fool yourself. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have created our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links. (Yeah, it just so happened that there were exactly 101!)

Oh, and mad props to our inspiration, 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies, one of the original authority documents on link building. It was just getting a bit rusty, that's all ("Host your own Web Ring"?). Anyway, enjoy the update.

71 Good Ways to Build Links

Love for Lists

1. Build a "101 list". These get Dugg all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can't resist linking to these (hint, hint).

2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an "authority".)

Hire Help

This list is of course quite long, because there are many ways to build links & link building can be a tiresome, expensive & arduous task. If you have plenty of cash but are scarce on time outsourcing all or part of your link building campaigns can prove to be a quite profitable business strategy.

6. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned 'PR' (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Paul Graham wrote a great article titled The Submarine which highlights how PR firms get media exposure. Be warned that many PR firms can be quite hit or miss with their promotions & even some of the "successes" may not stick around long. If permanent links are your main goal, make sure that is clearly articulated to the PR firm in advance, as some PR firms sponsor temporary payola content that disappears about a month after your check clears. ;)

7. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. If you want low-risk high-quality links Jim Boykin's Internet Marketing Ninjas& Garrett French's Citations Labs are probably the only SEOs firms doing it at scale. Their link building packages start at $5,000 a month and up. If you can't afford to fully outsource your link building, you may want to hire Debra Mastler to train your in house staff.

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

8. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It's an accessibility thing.)

9. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

10. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

11. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

12. Syndicate articles to trusted blogs & business news websites like Business Insider & TechCruch. Also consider promoting your content on niche industry websites & on social sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn & SlideShare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic. (Update: about a half-decade after publishing this article many of these article directories were penalized by the Google Panda algorithm & Google has grown to take a more dubious view of these sites as link sources - even though Google still syndicates their ads to these very same sites.)

13. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

14. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb, PRLeap, etc. While many press release sites now add nofollow to press releases, you can also compliment your press releases with media centers on your own site & have custom graphics, data and features on your site so that people who see the release may link directly at the associated pages on your site.

15. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

16. Trade articles with other webmasters.

17. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

18. Write about, and link to, companies with "in the news" pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

19. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links. Even if you do not have a "feel good" angle, you can still get mentions by leveraging data from your surveys as a hook for a story. When we surveyed searchers the survey was later mentioned by an important governmental body. Services like AYTM and Google Surveys are quite affordable.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Bookmarking

20. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

21. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

22. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

23. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

24. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

25. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site. Or if you track companies which are frequently covered on meme trackers you can send a tip to the TechMeme editors and get a thank you mention of your Twitter account.

Local & Business Links

26. Join the Better Business Bureau.

27. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

28. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

29. List your site at the local library's Web site.

30. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

31. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other's business cards. As an example, we've worked with Wordtracker to promote a co-produced keyword strategies guide.

32. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional "normal" links from people asking about your site on social media and web forums.

Easy Free Links

33. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

34. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers or Quora and provide links to relevant resources.

35. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

36. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. Getting added is only half the battle. Make sure you regularly monitor your page for zealot editors who may decide to arbitrarily delete it. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

37. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

38. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

39. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide links; unfortunately, some will not).

40. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products. The key is to be relevant and have links seem more incidental or complimentary rather than having it look like you are posting just for the links.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

41. Most smaller businesses are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

42. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

43. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

44. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

45. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority. Amazon looks at reviewers who are well liked by other Amazon customers & offers some of them the opportunity to get free products to review via their Vine program.

46. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

47. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

48. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

49. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

50. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN (now Bing), and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

51. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

52. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX, then promote these features on design blogs.

53. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

54. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Link Trading

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks which are full of low quality sites & hide the links section in a back alley nobody (other than GoogleBot) sees.

56. In case you didn't get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads was the most reputable firm in this niche when we originally published this list, but Google has certainly cracked down on paid links over the years.

58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links. Don't ask to buy links, ask to advertise.

59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

Freebies & Giveaways

64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think rankings for terms like football betting odds, keyword tool or mortgage estimator are worth?

66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like Wordpress. Don't forget the "Designed by example.com" bit in the footer! To mitigate some risks one can point links at a page other than the home page.

67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) "celebrities" in your industry make great link bait.

70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem "real" in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

30 Bad Ways to Build Links

Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

Directories

72. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.

Forum Spam

73. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

74. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

75. Post nothing but "me too" posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

76. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum account and answer your own question raving about how great your own site is.

77. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

78. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

79. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.

Blog Spam

80. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

81. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

82. Say nothing unique or relevant to the post at hand. Make them assume an automated bot hit their comments.

83. Better yet, use automated bots to hit their comments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

84. Send pings to everyone talking about a subject. In your aggregation post, state nothing of interest. Only state that other people are talking about the topic.

85. Don't even link to any of the sites you are pinging. Send them pings from posts that do not even reference them.

Garbage Link Exchanges

86. Send out link exchange requests mentioning PageRank.

87. Send link exchange emails which look like an automated bot sent them (little or no customization, no personal names, etc.).

88. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Converse, Google, and Yahoo!.

89. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites.

Spam People in Person

90. Go to webmaster conferences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affiliates make millions doing nothing.

91. Instead of asking people what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.

Be Persistant

92. Send a webmaster an alert to every post you make on your website.

93. Send a webmaster an email every single day asking for them to link to your website.

94. Send references to your site to the same webmaster from dozens of different email accounts (you sly dog).

95. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dollar each day until they give in.

Getting Links by Being a Jerk

96. Emulate the RIAA. When in doubt, file a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl. (Failing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

97. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you.

98. Send thousands of fake referrals at every top ranking Web site, guaranteeing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or millions of dollars in free, unclaimed money.

99. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talking on a cell phone or reading a book. When you run into other people say "excuse you, jerk".

100. Spill coffee on people or find creative ways to insult people to coax them into linking at your site.

101. Sue other webmasters for deep linking to your site. Well, this is more "hilariously dumb" than it is a "bad linking practice".

Calls to Action

Did you really make it to the end of the list? Thanks for staying with us! And now for our shameless plugs:

Did you enjoy this article? Give us some link love, and don't forget to bookmark this page on Delicious.

Want to learn more about link building? Read more SEO Book link building articles, and new posts on the SEO Book blog.

Do you need help with your link building? Join our SEO Training program today and learn tons of link building tips. You will gain immediate access to the web's #1 link building forum and our 12 week link building blueprint.